A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations, is really an uncreative mind.
A large ocean liner was headed across the Atlantic fromPortsmouth to New York. As it neared its destination at night, a lookout onthe wing of the bridge reported, ‘Light, bearing on the starboardbow.’‘Is it steady or moving astern?’ the captain called out
Conflictis the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. Itinstigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplikepassivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.